Growing California District Moves to SAN To Protect Data Systems

With an eye toward improved disaster recovery, Castro Valley Unified School District in California has moved to a SAN-based system to protect critical data housed on its newly centralized systems, including both virtualized and non-virtualized servers. The district has chosen the Reldata9240i Unified Storage System to support its expanding infrastructure and new technology initiatives, including an enhanced SIS, a new food services system, and e-mail archiving.

The 14-school district, located in the San Francisco Bay area, recently centralized the majority of its servers at its district office, with many of its most important applications running on these servers. "As we move toward a more centralized system to support our technology initiatives, expanding Web sites and, as a result, an ever-increasing need for additional capacity, we knew we'd need a solution that would easily facilitate restoration if something went wrong--it had to be nearly bulletproof," said Bruce Gidlund, director of technology for CVUSD. "Based on our experience with the Reldata solution so far, we have the assurance of greater uptime and peace of mind, knowing that our mix of virtual and non-virtual servers are working in tandem with the Reldata 9240i storage area network (SAN) to ensure the availability of critical data in the event of an emergency or software failure."

Gidlund said the Reldata network's rapid deployment has already saved time, and features such as snapshot scheduling will save his IT team countless hours on system management and maintenance. And, he added, the installation of the 9240i and CVUSD's subsequent migration of its servers to the SAN will also save money on future server purchases, having freed up all of the district's other servers to be repurposed at individual school sites as needed.

"The ability to create automated snapshots is one of the many features that made the Reldata solution attractive to us, so we can have continuous fallback points without overrunning our storage space," said Gidlund. "This, combined with flexibility, ease of management, simple installation and the company's reputation for exceptional service and reliability, made [this] the right choice for our IT needs."

A detailed brochure and datasheet on the Reldata 9240i Unified Storage System is available for download (.pdf format) here.

About the Author

Scott Aronowitz is a freelance writer based in Las Vegas. He has covered the technology, advertising, and entertainment sectors for seven years. He can be reached here.

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